Published 4:00 am, Thursday, February 19, 1998

1998-02-19 04:00:00 PDT SAN RAFAEL -- It's hard to tell who is having a tougher time of it in San Rafael these days -- the homeless or the City Council.

Unless the city can resolve a long-simmering dispute, the homeless may someday find their beloved downtown dining hall moved under Highway 101, taking over a building that currently houses an auto body shop.

And if that happens, City Council members may be looking for a place to hide because they've managed to upset almost every neighborhood group and clergy member in town, which even by sleepy suburban standards is no small political feat.

In the eye of the hurricane is the St. Vincent de Paul dining room on 2nd and B streets, which has been serving about 300 meals a day to Marin County's poor for the past 16 years. Outside of a few churches, St. Vincent's offers the only free feeding program in Marin County, which is a credit to San Rafael's compassion and suggests that the city is carrying an unfair load for the rest of their affluent county brethren.

But the poor and destitute are not the best ambassadors for downtown merchants, and when San Rafael suffered through the recession a few years back, some business owners began to complain. Competition from nearby malls contributed to an 11 percent downtown vacancy rate at the same time the numbers of homeless increased.

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The situation was further heated by a belief held by previous directors of St. Vincent's that they were not responsible for the actions of the homeless who congregated on the sidewalks and were occasionally less than cordial to merchants and shoppers.

The council reacted by trying to force the dining room out of the downtown area, a move resisted by St. Vincent's directors, who noted that most of their clients reside downtown. Years of negotiations went nowhere, so the city finally came up with a novel plan. They declared St. Vincent's property part of a redevelopment project, under the guise of downtown revitalization, which would allow the city to condemn buildings or acquire them through eminent domain.

At the same time, St. Vincent's continued to submit new relocation sites for the city's consideration, some of which would have placed them in residential neighborhoods or near schools and playgrounds. This did not go over so well with the neighbors. One group, the Bret Harte Neighborhood Association, collected more than 500 signatures opposing the relocation and pointedly suggested that the city was trying to move its homeless problem rather than solve it.

The case of St. Vincent's also became a rallying point for the pastors and congregations of all the local churches. And as the council found out rather painfully this week, no one can organize people faster than a church leader, outside of a cash-carrying lobbyist and one sainted farm worker.

More than 600 people packed the council chambers Tuesday night when the city officially unveiled its plan to redevelop B Street -- and, by the way, kick St. Vincent's out of its longtime home.

It didn't help matters that the city planners had also recommended that the city give St. Vincent's $1.4 million building to the developer. Or that after sending bids to 60 developers, only one had been returned, and the city seemed quite prepared to accept it.

But hundreds of voters and a number of civic and church leaders can do funny things to a steamrolling council, especially after it was made abundantly clear that the city's redevelopment plan is viewed as little more than costly ruse to rid San Rafael of its homeless kitchen. So after two hours of emotional testimony, the council voted unanimously to delay redevelopment plans until after it comes to grips with the future location of St. Vincent's.

That meeting takes place on Monday, but chances are it will be awhile before a decision on St. Vincent's is reached. For one, the council now has before it several thousand signatures from city and county residents saying that they want St. Vincent's to remain downtown. And more important, after six years of negotiations that did not involve any public hearings or input, the fate of St. Vincent's has now become the most public fight in the city's recent history.

Nor will it be easy for the council to ignore the hundreds of pleas for "compassion and moral leadership," or the threat of more lawsuits than a Disney trademark infringement.

"We would have a true credibility issue . . . if we went ahead with this issue tonight," Mayor Al Boro said by way of understatement to the cheering audience.

Other than Sue Brown, St. Vincent's new director, and the hundreds of other citizens in attendance, no one was probably happier with their decision than the owners of Jacopi Auto Body.

For it was Mr. and Mrs. Jacopi who recently discovered that their business had been selected by the city as the best possible home for St. Vincent's, freeway overpass notwithstanding.

Yesterday, Belle Jacopi told me that they have hired an attorney to fight the city's plan and that she and her husband have every intention of keeping their business right where it is for another 30 years.

Hopefully, the City Council will have come up with a better plan by then.